You Should Patent It

“Anil, you should patent this.”

That’s how it started. Here is the story from the beginning.

One afternoon I had a Kekule moment. Since this is connected with electronics, should I say a Black (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Stephen_Black) moment?

I was then working on a new design for a PWM motor controller that was called Cruiser Mark II, Cruiser MK II for short. As “Mk II” indicates, we had a controller called Cruiser already and Mk II was to be its new, improved, robust, reliable, failure proof version. A colleague and I had extensively analysed the failures and were doing everything we could to prevent those and other failures in the new version.

I wanted some more theoretical background on one aspect of PWM controllers and I was sitting in the factory library reading an authoritative text on the subject. The going was tough. Perhaps I had dozed off or gone into a reverie. I came back to this world with what I thought was an elegant design for the way current was sensed, processed* and used for current feedback and protection in Cruiser.

I abandoned what I was reading and over the next several weeks tried my idea. It worked like a charm. With the typical enthusiasm of an engineer, I inserted it into the new design. We built prototypes and tested them. They worked. It saved a lot of money in terms of production costs and was far more reliable than the earlier design. I talked about it to several people connected with the product.

We finally launched the product. I personally tested several units of the first production lot. I was testing one unit when a very senior leader of the team connected with the product passed by. He stopped and said, “Anil, I think you should patent this”. I looked at him blankly. He was firm. “You should!”, he said, nodded in affirmation and went on his way.

I pushed it to a corner of my mind and once the production was in full swing and the regular production and testing and the quality assurance team had taken over the product, I set about finding out what it means to patent something. I hit a solid wall. No one knew. I contacted everyone in the not inconsiderable network in the company I had to no avail. Finally, I gave up. The company had no culture of IP.

More than a decade later I entered the IP field myself. I assisted several individuals and teams patent their inventions. I always felt that it was ironic that I could not patent my own invention but had the opportunity to assist many. I still do that as a profession.

After I became familiar with IP law in I realised that I could not have patented my  invention once the product was released into the market. To put that in formal language, it was already in the public domain and hence not novel.

I wonder, even today, if it was indeed novel. That was the age before GoogleTM. Would a novelty search have brought anything up and “killed” my invention? Was it already in public domain? Was it already protected by a patent and was I an innocent infringer?

More questions than I have answers for.

In any case, if I have to put down the lessons learned:

You have to apply for a patent before the invention is used and released to the public.

The invention should be novel. It should be a “new invention” as the Indian Patents Act calls it.

Secrecy is important.

You need an environment and culture of IP in the organisation.

It should make business sense to patent an invention.

And so on.

* For those who have technical curiosity here is what I had “invented”.

Cruiser had two current sensors. They were low resistance shunts needing delicate workmanship. One for current feedback and the other for fault protection. The circuit looked like this.

Mk II had a single sensor. It was a hall effect sensor. The output of the sensor was amplified and electronically rectified for current feedback. The same output was also fed to a peak detector to shut off the drive if the signal exceeded a predetermined limit. The circuit looked like this.

My First Brush with IP

I was an onion. Well, that was the role I was rehearsing for in a children’s play.

Some classmates and I were rehearsing for it with great enthusiasm. We had made cardboard masks for each vegetable. “GP miss” was in charge. I got the only copy of the book for one day to write down my dialogues. As I took the book home and prepared to write, a notice in the book caught my eye. It said that anyone who stages the play should pay the author a princely sum of twenty-five paise as royalty!

I proceeded to write things down but this notice nagged me. Where do we get twenty-five paise? How do we send it to the author? I pointed out the notice to my classmates and fellow actors and they just dismissed it. I took the book to GP miss and she brushed it off too.

I did not like the whole thing. I took the royalty business seriously and everyone was just brushing it aside. I asked my father if one could send a coin by post. He told me that one cannot. I had no idea about money order. I told myself that I will somehow solve the problem and continued to rehearse.

The fateful day of the school annual day arrived. We were all getting ready. Makeup consisted of wearing predetermined clothes and wearing the masks. Someone was a bottle gourd and the mask was long. In the green room, someone bumped into Mr. Gourd and the mask broke. There was a desperate attempt to repair the mask and it got worse.

Some other mishap occurred and GP miss flew into a rage. It didn’t help that she was suffering from severe bout of migraine. She berated all of us heartily. And in one slash of her frail but energetic hand, she declared that we were not going to stage the play and stomped off the green room which looked quite grey, right then. Students ran after her to plead and cajole her to no avail.

A couple of us, in our own frustration, crumpled and threw away our masks forever ditching any chance of going on stage. When my own disappointment had subsided, I felt relieved.

After all, I didn’t have to send the twenty-five paise to the author. My conscience was clear.

That was my first brush with IP. Of course, I didn’t know that term. Nor the term copyright. I couldn’t have dreamt that one day, I would be an IP professional, assuming that I knew the word professional then!